Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

Inez and Vinoodh unveiling their Pirelli calendar with Sophia Loren and Lou Doillon.

I just want to extend a very heartfelt thank you to all the people who sent scripts in, submitted political slogans or phoned in to the 24 HOUR broadcast. I don't know how it felt from your side, but for myself it was one of the most exciting projects that I have undertaken. Thank you all.
I have a very strong belief in using fashion as a medium for political dicussion and this project not only helped to underpin SHOWstudio's continuing desire to explore that, but was a forerunner of larger projects on that topic that we hope to launch later this year.

Things have been a bit of a whirl since the 24-hour YSL broadcast, but in the week preceding it, Charlotte and I were guests of Swarovski at a lavish event and night of general merriment staged in Beijing to mark their new presence in China. This picture phone snap of Gemma Ward was taken at the press conference she gave after the fashion show. It was packed; they clearly adore her in China, and she handled the whole affair with grace, charm and elegance. A rare star indeed.

To view the show, our hosts had put us in a elevated place. As I stood there, I noticed great excitement in the crowd below, who all turned around and start photographing up at me. I felt somewhat uncomfortable as I don’t enjoy this sort of public attention, however I did feel very flattered. Until I realised that to one side of me was standing Eunis Chan, one of China’s supermodels and to the other side, a stunningly handsome young Chinese movie star...

This shot is of a man changing pixels on a huge, illuminated LCD screen in Beijing. It is a real fisherman's story of 'the one that got away', as the very next second after this was taken, the whole massive screen became one huge image of the face of Mickey Mouse, but my bloody mobile phone camera just wouldn’t fire and the car I was in sped off. Another picture that shall just live in my mind...

Of course, Swarovski's activities extend far beyond fashion: these crystal horses are part of the somewhat amazing Swarovski exhibition that accompanied the fashion show. The flower picture below was taken at Beijing airport. It's just odd but I thought rather lovely.

Yes, this is one of many SHOWstudio '12 Days' installations that were on many surfaces throughout the exhibition.

The Swarovski family invited us all to a feast at an exciting place designed by some of China's most interesting modern architects, which was situated just by the great wall, about two hours outside of Beijing. We arrived to see the sun set over the wall: all very enjoyable. This first picture of a very tired but beautiful Charlotte was taken as we arrived back late that night. The second's of Charlotte with the Creative Director of the Swarovski campaigns, Olivier Van Doorne.

Great to see the suggestions for Antony coming in. To make the brief really clear, I want suggestions for simple ways to make sound, not whole song treatments. For example, banging coconuts, tapping her foot whilst humming or playing the spoons.

Yours,

Nick

Today, after seven amazing years, Penny leaves us to become Professor of Fashion Imagery at the London College of Fashion. To say that she will be missed by every member of SHOWstudio is a very large understatement.

I was more or less half-way through the maelstrom of coloured chaos that was a five-day Dior couture shoot when I first met Penny. Juxtaposed with chainsaws, snakes, smashed pianos, magenta paint and crystal-encrusted car-sized satin dresses, Penny could not have been more of a contrast. A calm, almost serene Hitchcockian beauty only just managed to conceal the excitement and joy at being surrounded by such fashion insanity. For 30 minutes we sat and talked excitedly about SHOWstudio and the emerging possibilities of fashion film, fashion performance, live broadcasts, our loves and hates of photography and the sheer thrill of a new medium opening up before us. By the end of the interview I felt much more enthusiastic about my own work and I had a better understanding of it. I realise now that that is Penny's effect on people. When you work with Penny, whether it is a 6 hour non-stop live interview with Dame Vivienne Westwood or a quick soundbite backstage to a Vogue journalist, everybody comes away from the meeting feeling better about themselves.

Penny brings the rarest and most needed commodities to the world of fashion: intelligence and culture. It is these rare and precious qualities that she has built forever into the foundations of SHOWstudio - a gift which makes me one of the happiest men alive.

Thank you Penny.
Nick.

Dear Dorian, Ross, Paul, Alex and Greta,Â
As you know I would like to sell this Violence scent directly from our site. Can you indicate to me what the possibilities are. It might be just one bottle or 10 or thousands, there is just no way of telling.Â
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.Â
bestÂ
Nick. 
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Hello,Â

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Hello Nick et al

Please excuse my 'dragon's den' knowledge of commerce and my over-simplified 'plan'.
I think if this is being done correctly then there should be a way of telling how many you would sell. You would not make 10,000 bottles of perfume if your research had shown you were only going to sell 10 because it was a very niche market.

So I think the first step is to speak to someone who knows the market, work out where the product will be advertised (I would suggest it needs to go further than SHOWstudio) and then we could look at some rough figures of projected sales/units.

Then we can decide how rigourous our e-commerce strategy needs to be.

For instance if there are only 100 bottles we could just set up a paypal account (or an ebay shop says paul) and handle the whole thing fairly stress free ourselves . However, if we have a lot of product stored in warehouses that need to be shipped globally then clearly we will have to involve outside agencies

My feeling is that a limited run of 100 is the way to go. It gets the scent out there and works as an easy way of getting press for SHOW. Then, if there is a demand, we look into mass production

ross:)
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Hi Nick,

That's quite a big question really. From my point of view we can skip the details of presenting the product on the website - we'll be doing that anyway as part of the project, though the branding and positioning of the product are of course a very important and complex thing, some of which I'm sure you have in hand, and some of which I'm sure is in process.

The technicalities of selling products online strongly depends on whether you are selling one item, or 1000, or however many. The complexity and cost of the system set up really depends on the amount that's going through, there is no point in using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. Setting up an ecommerce system for one product is likely to loose money, not make it, but if it's something that's going to have more products added to it then you may recoup the investment later.

The process of taking an order/transaction is quite straightforward, and there are lots of well laid out models and best practises for this 

1) The Basket: We find out the quantity of the product a person wants.
2) The Checkout: We find out where they want to ship it to & take payment for the product.
3) The Processing: We receive the order, label, put postage on it and ship it.

The devil, as ever, is in the detail, and more importantly the scalability.

For one item it wouldn't be worth setting up on-line credit card processing facilities, for instance, and we may just have one large price for the item which takes into account packing and shipping costs to the rest of the world. The item could even be auctioned to the highest bidder. The payment could be taken via a method agreed with the purchaser, such as bank transfer/cheque/paypal. 

For between one an 100 items it would be worth considering a simple payment system, such as PayPal, where overheads on each transaction are higher than some methods, but cheaper than setting up a Merchant account with a bank, and on-line clearing, and a checkout process on our site. However PayPal would not necessarily present the image for the product you want to have, it depends how you want to position it's brand. A customised checkout process and in-line credit card clearing would be a nice experience for the end user, and keep the whole thing more 'on brand'

For 100+ it is more likely worth investing in a customised checkout process. If we are shipping lots of items then we would need set this up, and to consider how ordered are processed and dispatched, global shipping costs and hanlding charges, how to handle fraudulent transactions, how monies are accounted, how items are packaged for shipping ( that could also reflect back to the actual product design for the container for the scent ), how to manage customer queries and missing/broken items, who takes the items to the post office (or if we get them picked up, or shipped via courier etc.). Working all these details out to be optimal is worthwhile to maximise profit on the product, and to simplify the handling of the orders. 

A final choice is that you can pass handling the sales of the item entirely off to a third party, who will sell it on your behalf. This way we don't have as much control over the presentation and brand of the product, and a lot of the process becomes on of managing the relationship with the third party, and trying to get the appropriate presentation for your product in their context. This would be much like putting the item exclusively into any shop, like Dover Street or Liberties. You have the advantage (and disadvantage) of having the product amongst other items, in an environment where people are looking to purchase, but you will see return per unit, and won't have the presence within that shop. Generally new brands don't succeed very well on large product sites with many items on them, unless you put them across a number of different retailers : think Dover Street, Liberties and Selfridges, not just Dover Street. 

There are of course many points in between all of these, but mostly these are driven by the brand qualities of the product you are selling, and of course: where the audience you want to sell your product to are shopping. Because SHOWstudio isn't a shop, or may not have that audience, you double the work in trying to sell your product in also trying to drive the right traffic to SHOWstudio. Equally putting the scent on a generic shopping site may devalue it's brand, and still miss it's target audience. So the place, in my opinion, to start is to research into the customer for the product and how to access them. thereafter the choices will become clearer. 

I hope that's all of some help. 

_d._